TikTok's breakneck rise from niche video-sharing app to global social media behemoth has drawn intense scrutiny, particularly over its links to China, reports BSS.
In Washington, the platform has been accused of espionage.
The European Union suspects it was used to sway Romania's presidential election in favour of a far-right candidate.
And now Albania has banned it for a year, Prime Minister Edi Rama calling it the "thug of the neigbourhood".
Here are the main controversies surrounding the TikTok.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said Saturday the government would shut down social network TikTok for at least a year from 2025.
The move came less than a month after a 14-year-old student was killed and another injured in a fight near a school in Tirana.
The fight had developed from an online confrontation on social media.
The EU is probing whether far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu's surprise victory in the first round of Romania's presidential election was aided by Russian meddling and "preferential treatment" by TikTok.
It is the third investigation the commission has launched against TikTok, which risks fines of up to six percent of its global turnover.
The platform said it had taken "robust actions" to tackle election-related misinformation. Russia has denied interfering in the vote.
The United States in April passed a law obliging TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance to sell off the platform by January 19 on the grounds it allowed China to access data on US users.
If not, the platform would be banned in the United States -- denying TikTok its claimed 170 million users in the countries.
TikTok admitted ByteDance employees in China had accessed Americans' data but it has denied giving data to the Chinese authorities.
To protect data, the US government, the European Commission and Britain's government had already banned TikTok from their employees' work devices in 2023.
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
